Paypal announces flexible, ubiquitous developer platform

With the announcement of a new payments API that is detached from the web, …

Paypal has announced a brand new developer API called the Adaptive Payment Platform that will allow for monetary transactions of almost any size to take place nearly everywhere there’s an Internet connection. In addition to allowing for payments outside of the web, the new platform allows for nearly unlimited flexibility in how payments are handled.

CNET, reporting from a PayPal press conference this afternoon noted that the new API will allow developers to place themselves between buyers and sellers (and take a cut of the transaction if they like), split payments into multiple transactions, and choose which side of the transactions—buyer or seller—pays the Paypal transaction fees.

As a part of the announcement, Paypal disclosed that nearly 300 developer partners have been working with the API on a beta basis. A selection of these include Microsoft who have worked to integrate the new APIs into their cloud computing service Azure and Twitpay—a payment network that operates over the microblogging service Twitter. Others include LiveOps, MedPayOline, and Rainfall of Envelopes.

Paypal was launched in 1998 when exchanging money on the web was adifficult and fraught with danger. Having slowly rewritten how we think about online commerce (and getting acquired by eBay along the way), it has no doubt long had its eye on the bazillions of daily transactions that don’t take place while you’re sitting at your desk; indeed a vast majority of purchases still happen offline. There are of course a number of online credit card processing gateways that have filled this gap in the past, but the vast majority of these are a pain for developers to work with, and of course require the buyer to own a credit card, something Paypal does not.

Paypal has toyed with bringing electronic transactions to mobile users in the past with an application that ran on Sprint phones and more recently with an iPhone app (iTunes link). But these both have limited use-scenarios and are strictly controlled by PayPal themselves. With these new developer APIs, the world is open to integrating payments on any device with a net connection. This opens up the possibilities to any application on any mobile platform, gaming consoles, point of sale terminals in retail locations, and more.

Paypal intends to open the program to the public (in beta form) in November, presumably during the company’s first developer conference.

We attempted to use Paypal as our payment processor when I first started my software business. It was a nightmare. In the process of registering with them, we sent them "the wrong documentation" of some kind (I seem to remember it was the wrong person's SSN card or something silly like that). Anyway, we got flagged as a possible scammer and were never able to get off the black list. After MONTHS of trying to get paypal to work with us, we finally started using Authorize.NET and have never regretted it.

Ditto to that. I had truly nightmarish problems with them, and know several other people who they needlessly put through hell (including one whose bank account was suddenly drained, and painpal refused to tell him, or the police, where the money went). No matter how "convenient" their service might be, the possible downsides are absolutely, positively NOT worth the risks under any circumstances - they don't give a damn about you, all they want is your money.

I do agree that PayPal has some serious disadvantages and that I like Autorize.Net better. However, this is good news since some of our customers do not have or want to use credit cards and this is the only rapid payment option available for those customers. Now that they have an API where they can be kept totally in the background is great. I also like the bonus of having the customer paying the processing fees.

So they've made it more like normal merchant accounts and you could always pass on the PayPal fee to end-users just by charging extra. The ONLY advantage of PayPal from a consumer point of view is that it offers only a single point of failure for your financial details to leak out from, rather than many. I refuse to shop at web sites which DON'T transfer off-site to PayPal unless they are very big brands like Amazon. Web developers take note, we don't want your cute little on-site checkout process where we have to pass our credit card details to your own server. We have seen a million over checkouts and yours isn't special. Please KEEP the option to go off-site to PayPal and pay or the more security conscious won't buy from the companies you are supplying.

It's a shame it has to be evilBay's system that's serving this role though. They are a don't care company with a can't do attitude. Even Microsoft would be a million times better. How about Microsoft Money, online version? Stop squabbling with google and stamp on eBay who you might actually have a chance of beating...